Another Plea for Elizabeth Warren to Keep Her Day Job

Now that she's left He, Trump with a very clean clock for the next month or so, and now that she's drawn attention from some of the vulgar talking yam's lesser pilot fish, Senator Professor Warren has gotten back to work at her day job—which I devoutly wish a lot of people would let her continue to do for a couple more terms, dammit.

First, she's been making common cause with, of all people, Tom Cotton, the ambitious bobble-throated Arkansan pen-pal to the mullahs, on the issue of putting some teeth into the existing regulations that are designed to punish crooked investment advisors. From Roll Call:

Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and leading progressive voice, and Cotton, a young conservative Arkansas Republican who has made headlines during his first year in the Senate, announced Wednesday that they co-wrote a letter to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, asking for information on how FINRA is addressing revelations of bribery, fraud, extortion and forgery among some financial advisers. "The evidence clearly shows that FINRA's efforts to date have not been enough to address the incidence of misconduct among financial advisers," the senators wrote. "Each day that FINRA fails to take stronger action is another day that working families will be exposed to an unacceptably high risk of financial adviser misconduct."

On Tuesday, in a speech in Washington, she took on everybody's favorite American communications corporation, and appealed for renewed enforcement of existing anti-trust laws. (Thom Hartmann just ascended to glory.)

Warren's speech at a forum on monopolies came as part of her advocacy for greater enforcement of antitrust laws as American consumers pay higher prices for cable and Internet services than those elsewhere. Warren cited the cable giant specifically, along with technology players like Apple and Google, the big airlines and Wal-Mart. While the Obama administration has blocked some deals, the U.S. has been through a strong period of business consolidation. "Strong executive leadership could revive antitrust enforcement in this country and begin, once again, to fight back against dominant market power and overwhelming political power," Warren said in the Capitol Visitor Center. "But we need something else too—and that's a revival of the movement that created the antitrust laws in the first place."

She also pitched the theme in a way that conservatives should join in.

"Competitive markets generate so many benefits on their own that the government's only role in those markets should be simple and structural—prevent cheating, protect taxpayers, and maintain competition," Warren said. "Government intervention in concentrated markets inevitably becomes more and more complex and technocratic, as it attempts to impose complicated regulations in an effort to recreate the benefits of competitive markets."

I don't want her taking a new job when she's clearly just coming into her power in this one. If it's Tim Kaine, I'll take that trade.

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